The flail wail

Mitt Romney on Monday plans to refocus his campaign on tackling the US budget deficit, even as a media report highlighted concerns among some Republicans that his campaign was stumbling six weeks before the presidential election.

The Republican presidential nominee is expected to tell the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles that his deficit-reduction plan will cut $500bn a year in government spending by the end of his first term...

He will also criticise President Barack Obama for promising – but failing – to deliver on his campaign promise to pass immigration reform in his first year in office.

“Despite his party having majorities in both houses of Congress, the president never even offered up a bill,” Mr Romney says. “I will work with Republicans and Democrats to permanently fix our immigration system.”

There are two problems with Mr Romney's choice of the themes of deficit reduction and immigration reform. The first is deficit reduction. The second is immigration reform. Mr Romney can't win on either of these themes. He can't win on deficit reduction because his tax and spending plans, sketchy as they remain, will either increase the deficit or increase taxes on the middle class; his denials that this will happen lead quickly into a maze of mathematically irreconcilable claims that, if they don't necessarily refute his claims, do confuse voters and neutralise his argument. Deficit-cutting is a weak issue, less important to voters than employment or personal income, but it used to be the one economic issue where Mr Romney could count on a consistent advantage over Barack Obama; now, even that's no longer the case.

And he can't win on immigration reform because he's barely talked about immigration reform, he represents a political party that has largely been co-opted by a fervid anti-amnesty movement, and when he has talked about the issue he's vowed to veto the DREAM Act and used terms like "self-deportation". He trailed Barack Obama among Hispanics by 64% to 27% as of late August.

The big story driving the news cycle Monday morning is Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei's article in Politico, "Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled", on the disarray over the past few weeks in Mr Romney's campaign. They report that Stuart Stevens, the campaign's chief strategist, scrapped the convention speech he'd commissioned eight days earlier from Peter Wehner, a top Republican speechwriter, "setting off a chaotic, eight-day scramble that would produce an hour of prime-time problems for Romney, including Clint Eastwood’s meandering monologue to an empty chair." To judge from today's attempted reboot, Mr Romney is still stumbling.

This of course is just horserace reporting. It'd be easy enough to write the whole thing off as a mediocre candidate with an unexpectedly poor campaign team. Frankly, I don't think that's what's going on here, and I don't think either Mr Romney or Mr Stevens are entirely at fault. Take the themes they're focusing on today. On the deficit, Mitt Romney didn't invent the mathematically irreconcilable trifecta of promising massive tax cuts, no reductions in Medicare or defence spending, and lower deficits; Republicans have been running on that platform since Ronald Reagan. It's the policy incarnation of the splits between three of the party's constituencies: the wealthy, the defence establishment, and the elderly. On immigration, Mitt Romney didn't drive the anti-immigration wave that has swept through the GOP over the past decade; he's simply been forced to go along with it. His incoherence on this subject is the policy incarnation of the split between three of the party's constituencies: conservative Hispanics (including Cubans) and pro-immigration business elites, on the one hand, and ethnically nationalist whites, on the other. What we're seeing here is not simply a flailing campaign run by a mediocre candidate. It's a campaign trying to cope with the fact that the fundamental coalitions and policy bargains its party represents are falling apart.

As Jon Stewart put it, the only person to actually put real numbers to the Republican's plans was Bill Clinton. The Republicans are promising to INCREASE military spending (which is already a huge percentage of the budget) and to keep medicare spending intact (which is another HUGE percentage of the budget). They will then cut taxes on the wealthy. Now, how do you figure to go from a $1.2T deficit to a $500B surplus (that is a change of $1.7T) by reducing your income and increasing your expenditures?

I test drove a car the other day and they salesman kept repeating to me that the Forte handled better than the Focus, despite my comments to the contrary. You can keep repeating your mantra all you want, it doesn't mean that it is true. Just because Ryan and Romney repeat that they can do this New Math does not mean that it will actually happen.

To me, Mitt is a potentially good candidate who's wrong for 2012. What's Romney's strength? Pragmatism. Deal making. Cutting to the chase. It's how Mitt made money in business. It's how pretty much any of us make money in business. That could be Romney's brand.

But not in 2012, not with the Tea Party and Grover Norquist. Pragmatism is weakness. Deal making is compromise. Cutting to the chase is selling out.

No wonder Romney's campaign is struggling to find focus. The man is asked to be what he is not. He'd have to be one heck of an actor to pull that one off.

I think the reality is sinking in that Mitt is not a good candidate. Perhaps the MA experience is useful. He was awful running for senate in the 1990's. Truly awful. Looked and sounded like a stuck up piece of wood. The story - at least the one circulated within the local Mormon community - is he ran because of his father, George, and his heart wasn't really in it. (George died the next year.) There was one ad I remember with Mitt in a sweater standing in front of what may have been his house in Belmont. He was absolutely unable to counter Ted Kennedy's relatively basic attacks on his buyout history. Kennedy ran ads and brought in workers from some companies that Bain had bought and which then laid off lots of people. Basic politics. Remember, Kennedy was bouncing off his low point, having married Vicki a few years earlier. If not for that marriage, I think Kennedy would have been gone because he was widely seen as a drunk carouser on his way down.

When he ran for governor, he was up against a candidate so obscure I couldn't remember her without googling. The state treasurer. Not well known then and not remembered now. Mitt's big thing in that campaign was "I'm a moderate on social issues". Liar. He rejected the endorsement of the pro-life MA group. Not kidding. The Democrat had no money. He did better at attacking this time, linking her through her husband to Enron. BTW, Romney out and out lied about his residency in MA, saying he'd filed as a MA not Utah resident when in fact that wasn't true and he was amending his returns (meaning refiling them). So don't trust him about his taxes because he has lied about them before.

If you remember that campaign, what you saw was similar to now: no details about plans except he'd cut from the budget, which was necessary in everyone's eyes because of the recession. No promises about taxes. No promises about much except that he was going to use business principles.

Applying this to today, I see a guy who has been trying to run without specifying anything in the hope that people hate Obama enough to vote against him. He's relying on the far right to martial some form of outrage over social issues that offend them. He's sounding bluff and tough because that both compensates for his utter lack of policy experience and because it worked for GWBush and others before that. His idea has always been to let others decide what he stands for. Thus you see pieces in which Mitt is defended as a moderate who doesn't really mean the bad stuff. Or Mitt doesn't really mean the tax cuts because that would be stupid. In other words, his strategy has been to let others find reasons to vote for him, to find in him something that the other guy doesn't have, meaning that he's not Obama, not a hidden Muslim born either in Kenya or Indonesia, not the destroyer of capitalism (whatever that means), and so on.

I tell my friends Mitt is the worst candidate I've ever seen if it weren't for the hatred so many white people, particularly men, have for Obama and the polarization of so many voters around religious issues, meaning mostly abortion. He is the worst candidate since McGovern on the left and Goldwater on the right. But who knows maybe we'll have President Mitt and the next Supreme Court justice will be David Souter's clone.

One thread the Republicans have been falling back on drives me insane: the notion that they can't divulge the details of their plans for fear of giving ammo to the Democrats.
I mean their explanation is more than enough to discredit whatever plan they may have: it isn't good enough to withstand critics!

Just to add, I think Romney's flailing is a good reason not to vote for him rather than just cosmetic. The executive branch is undoubtedly rich with people who find the doing of their jobs to be one alternative. His inability to specify, justify and stand by a vision for the government makes me doubt he'll be effective if elected, stellar resume notwithstanding.

I've said this before, and I will say it again; Mitt Romney has no political acumen. Don't believe me? Just look at the press conference that he gave after the Mideast embassy attack - he was smirking as he finished up his attack on Obama and was walking out. SMIRKING. What the hell is wrong with this guy?

"I don't think Mitt Romney is at fault for morphing from a universal health care-championing, pro-choice Republican moderate into an extreme right-wing ideologue, because honestly, who has any other choice?"

Okay I'm not quoting you exactly but it's an awfully close paraphrase.

Actually there's less to blame in the case of Limbaugh since presumably he really is that way. Romney clearly made a conscious, cynical, opportunistic decision to change every belief he's ever had so that he could run for President as a Republican.

Even the former right-wing Congressman Joe Scarborough this week eviscerated Romney this week for having zero substance or integrity, saying that Romney likely will lose "...and should, given that he’s neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate. He’s just an ambitious man."

"Forced to go along with it" is a pretty ridiculous excuse, no one forced him to do anything.

This is the blog section, where The Economist's journalists can write pretty much whatever comes to mind. If you're looking for 'news' you took a wrong turn. I prefer these blogs, though. They are far more honest.

Romney had a huge advantage coming into the race: his birth certificate has not been questioned; he wasn't called a "Mormon socialist"; his faith was not not even doubted, but merely questioned; and noone has called him un-American.

His opinions were largely considered by US media on the factual basis, were not taken out of context, and so on.

He even came into the campaign as a moderate from East Coast with a generally good track record, no antics of Clintonian fame and praises from both sides of the isle about his management abilities.

Yet he's on the losing end.

Sorry, Mitt, but, as it is frequently said, each man reaches the limits of his incompetence. Noone took those decisions for you, and, even if you have to learn it the hard way, that decision about moving sharply to the right, picking Ryan or going with the worst of conspiracy theories were yours to make. You can, in theory, hide behind the backs of your campaign officials - but what were YOU thinking? You were out there in the room reading the same papers.

Having just listened to Mitt speak, as he now says, "off the cuff" about the "47%", it should be even more clear that he's a terrible candidate who depends on anti-Obama, not pro-Mitt voting.

It really was an amazing choice of words. The 47% is heavily made of the elderly, who have always skewed GOP as voters, so he managed to betray one of the most valued constituencies and get the basic facts wrong. And much of the rest of the 47% is working class white people, the kind who also vote for the GOP.

You can't be President and say such stupid stuff any more. Maybe back in the days of Warren Harding, but not now.

let's be honest here guys. The Romney campaign is done, he shan't recover from this past week's gaffes. He said "my job is not to worry" about 47% of voters. His Libya reaction. The turmoil among campaign staff. His unwillingness to spell out his tax plan. The Economist has been saying all along that this election was the Republicans' to lose. Well, is there any other way to accurately describe what's happened?

Jomiku, I think there are a lot of non-racist, not irrational and not even socially conservative reasons not to support Obama, but I agree with you that Romney seems determined to mitigate them one by one. I don't think he'd be a terrible president and I think he'd be a lot like like Obama but I agree that so far he's the least competent candidate I've ever seen.

I remember in the worst days of the 2008 campaign, my brother's father-in-law asked me how I expected to vote and I told him that John McCain seems to be doing everything he can think of to make me vote for Obama but I refuse to be manipulated. Romney, however, looks set to pull it off.

I can't pretend I have any idea how difficult it is to run a campaign, ie to maintain a coherent overall message while also sporting agility to adjust daily.

But Romney's camaign has been in shambles from day one. Gaffes from aides on television, on the campaign trail, in Europe, and gaffes from Mitt himself, in addition to his inability to elaborate on specific plans once in office. Full of ambition, empty of substance.